Menu

Friday vespers meditation: spitting on Che

The last time I confronted someone who was wearing a Che t-shirt was a few years ago, on the train between New York and New Haven. I gave up talking to the shirt morons after that. I realized after my exchange with that particular doofus that there is indeed such a thing as invincible ignorance.

Now I only go after idiots who decorate walls with images of Che. The t-shirt simply identifies the wearer as an ignorant fool. Che images on walls are monuments, and no mass murderer deserves a monument of any kind.

How I love to spit on such images, and to make sure my spitting is noticed.

Well….as the bells for vespers ring… consider what the essayist below has to say about those t-shirts. Someone has actually given it a lot of thought. And he does not seem to be Cuban.

If you agree with his take on the whole deal, then every moron who wears a Che t-shirt is spitting on the real Che Guevara.

Che Guevara Shirts: Proof of the Triumph of Capitalism

by John Engle, at Somewhat Reasonable (blog of the Heartland Institute)

Want to know why capitalism will always triumph over collectivism? It responds to people’s desires, even those who would consider themselves enemies of capitalism. A case-in-point is the ubiquitous Che Guevara t-shirt.

Anyone who has spent any time walking down a city street will have come across at least one young person wearing Che’s famous likeness. Some leftists have argued that the sheer pervasiveness and popularity of the image is proof of the enduring principles of which Che has sometimes been seen as a symbol. Yet that is not the case.

The Che Guevara t-shirts actually represent the ultimate power of capitalism, the power to transform the most potent symbols in opposition to it into commodities that can be bought and sold in the marketplace. The market does not care about what the symbol “represents.” All that matters is that the symbol can be bought and sold. That is the ultimate neutering of socialism and radical leftism, when the young people who Che might in another time have tried to galvanize to violent rebellion tacitly accept the capitalist system. When Che and his ilk became fashion symbols rather than political symbols, they were finally defeated. That is the real beauty of the free market: its ability to transform an enemy into harmless kitsch.